The Egyptian Candidate’s Mother

Three weeks ago, Cairo was plastered with election posters for a smiling man with a big white beard proposing, “Dignity for Egypt!” The candidate was Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a fundamentalist Salafi whose face could also be seen on T-shirts as thousands of his supporters blocked downtown traffic. Abu Ismail was a TV preacher who had taken off his clerical garb, put on a suit and tie, and stood in Tahrir Square, denouncing the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. He was an exemplar of a simple populism. (I’ve written about the combination of religion and revolution in this week’s New Yorker.) And then, just as suddenly, Abu Ismail was out of the race—disqualified because of the discovery that he had an American mother.

His rhetoric, poised between the pious and the revolutionary, worked well with crowds, though his utterances were often eccentric. He claimed that Pepsi was an acronym standing for “Pay Every Penny Saving Israel” and that the Sinai desert held the key to Egypt’s future prosperity. “Egypt is full of sand!” I heard him telling an audience in a well-to-do Cairo suburb. “And yet Egypt does not exploit its resources. The Germans make lenses from sand. Why don’t we have researchers for this?” Privately, senior activists in the Salafi Al-Nour Party seemed reluctant to endorse him. One admitted to me that they simply didn’t think he was very smart.

When I interviewed Abu Ismail, his responses were vague and evasive. Near the end, he said that he had many questions for me also. He said he couldn’t understand the Western mentality, that, as he saw it, stood up with all righteousness for justice at home but meted out injustice to others. He seemed unable to reconcile the Americans he had met and liked in America with their policies abroad. “So when I go to America I feel I love the American citizens. And when I return here we are upset with America.”

He was not shy to denounce the Camp David accords, or to say that Egypt should end its dependence on American financial and military aid. So it was greeted with some irony when rumors broke that before her death, while living for a time in California, his mother had became a naturalized American citizen. According to new regulations, presidential candidates must have two Egyptian-only parents.

Abu Ismail has consistently disputed these charges, first saying that it was only his sister, who still lives in California, who had an American passport, and that his mother had only a Green Card; then that she had only applied for a citizenship; and finally by denouncing documentary evidence as forgeries and treason, part of a plot by the powers that be and the Americans to get him out of the race.

Abu Ismail is not the only serious contender to be ousted on narrow technicalities. The Electoral Commission, a panel presided over by a judge appointed by Mubarak, excluded ten candidates. Khairat El-Shater, the Muslim Brotherhood’s first-choice candidate (they are now fielding his replacement, Mohamed Morsy), was disqualified for having been convicted of being a member of a banned organization that is no longer banned. Omar Suleiman, Mubarak’s chief of military intelligence, was apparently missing thirty-one signatures of the fifty thousand needed to qualify.

Over three successive Fridays, protesters have flocked back to Tahrir Square. Many of them are Salafis angered by Abu Ismail’s disqualification. Some had come to Tahrir for the first time, from distant governorates, and camped out in tents for a sit-in. They talked about what they see as a conspiracy against Abu Ismail, but their concerns are larger. “We are not here just for Sheikh Hazem,” said one man, with a burnt dark face and galabiya that marked him as a farmer. “We are here because of the injustice in the country.” Others complained more specifically about what they and many Egyptians feel is a manipulation of the presidential election. One man, a salesman for Google with a black beard, bent over a laptop hooked up to a streetlamp for electricity, counted their demands on his fingers: making it possible to appeal the electoral commission’s decisions; giving parliament more power and the military less.

These are issues that even the stray liberals on the square share. The rules do seem arbitrarily applied and elastic. Liberal Egyptians and Western governments breathed a sigh of relief that the radical front-runner was out of the race. But the danger of an election that is not perceived as free and fair is a greater and more insidious threat than a radical with a big beard.